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Vienna Sights

Schwarzenbergplatz

Plaza/Square/Piazza

Published 04/07/2016

Fodor's Review

The center of this square is marked by an oversize equestrian sculpture of Prince Schwarzenberg—he was a 19th-century field marshal for the imperial forces. See if you can guess which building is the newest—it's the one on the northeast corner (No. 3) at Lothringer Strasse, an exacting reproduction of a building destroyed by war damage in 1945 and dating only from the 1980s. The military monument occupying the south end of the square behind the fountain is the Russian War Memorial, set up at the end of World War II by the Soviets; the Viennese, remembering the Soviet occupation, call its unknown soldier the "unknown plunderer." South of the memorial is the stately Schwarzenberg Palace, designed as a summer residence by Johann Lukas von Hildebrandt in 1697 and completed by Fischer von Erlach, father and son.